Make Your Team Feel Powerful

Research has shown that helping others feel more powerful can boost productivity, improve performance, and leave employees feeling more satisfied on the job. A study conducted by Yona Kifer of Tel Aviv University and published in Psychological Science found that employees were 26% more satisfied in their roles when they had positions of power.

Feelings of power also translated to more authenticity and feelings of well-being, the researchers found. Power made the subjects feel more “true to themselves,” enabling them to engage in actions that authentically reflected values they hold dear. This subjective sense of authenticity in turn created a higher sense of wellbeing and happiness.

And yet Gallup research has found that an astonishing 70% of American workers aren’t engaged or committed to their employers. Gallup estimates the cost of their apathy at between $450 billion to $550 billion in lost productivity per year. I’m guessing those workers aren’t feeling all that powerful.

While it would be great to think we could just repeat a mantra each morning to facilitate these wellbeing-enhancing feelings of power, another global study conducted by Gallup found that among some 600,000 workers across several industries, leadership support, recognition, constant communication, and trust were essential to creating a thriving environment where front-line employees felt they had the autonomy to make a real difference in the organization. In other words, to instill a sense of power in people for sustained engagement you need the support of the entire system.

In contrast, overly structured management-driven empowerment programs that are coupled with continuous improvement initiatives don’t work, according to researchers from the University of Illinois, as employees tend to feel such programs are often forced upon them without their input on the initiatives’ usefulness.

Instead, the researchers found that even the least powerful employees will commit to finding ways to make their organization more efficient if given the autonomy to make decisions and execute the improvement measures they find most useful. Managers are advised to act more as coaches, giving direction and support, and trusting that frontline employees, who are the experts on the ground, know better which improvements ultimately work in the best interest of the organization. The study, by Gopesh Anand, Dilip Chhajed, and Luis Delfin, shows that employees will be most committed to the organization when they feel their day-to-day work environment is autonomous and when they trust leaders to have their back. These feelings of power and the reciprocal trust in leadership in turn lead to proactive behaviors by frontline employees, as they’re likely to take charge in continuously seeking ways to improve their day-to-day work practices that lead to organizational efficiency.

While a company-wide effort of making employees feel autonomous and trusted yields the greatest benefit in employee commitment, managers can start with their own team members. Encouraging others to share their unvarnished views on important issues, delegating and sharing leadership, assigning managerial tasks, communicating frequently, and allowing for mistakes to serve as learning opportunities can all empower employees and develop them into independent thinkers who aren’t afraid to take risks and actively contribute in moving the organization forward.

It isn’t necessary, or indeed possible, to elevate every member of staff to a leadership position. But a good manager can offer choices that lead to empowerment, no title required. While we know that people instinctively crave higher status, M. Ena Inesi of London Business School discovered that agency is just as important. She primed study participants to feel either powerful or powerless. They then had to choose whether to shop at a nearby store with fewer options, or a store that was further away but which offered considerably more options. When participants felt powerless, they craved more choices. The participants who felt powerful, however, were content to have fewer choices. “You can imagine a person at an organization who’s in a low-level job,” Inesi said at the time.“You can make that seemingly powerless person feel better about their job and their duties by giving them some choice, in the way they do the work or what project they work on.”

People need to believe they have a sense of control over their situation, particularly in times of change and uncertainty, or they may adopt what psychologist Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania termed “learned helplessness,” where they basically stop trying. In a similar vein, Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer conducted research on mindfulness and ‘choice’ and found that giving people choices over their environment actually extended life by years, according to her studies conducted among the elderly in nursing homes.

Tom Peters once said, “Leaders don’t create followers; they create more leaders.” Giving your employees real autonomy and helping them feel more powerful is not only your best chance to buck the trend of disengagement and apathy; it is at the heart of competitive strategy.